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Visiting the Taylor garden of Jack and Carol Nowacki feels a little bit like island hopping.

Enter the West Hospital Street yard from the side, and guests run right into a landscaped patch where some of the couple's nearly 20 varieties of shrubs and bushes thrive. Turn the corner, and they see a latticed archway set off in an island full of multicolored perennials and greenery, which provides an entryway to a tiered expanse of flowers and bushes.

"We've planted the garden so that something is blooming all the time," Mrs. Nowacki said.

The couple has lived in the home for around 35 years and used to have a pool, vegetable garden and not much else in the yard. The vegetables encompassed a 20-foot-by-25-foot swath of the property, but the Nowackis decided to remove them after wild animals kept swiping the food.

"We'd plant, and they'd eat," Mrs. Nowacki said.

The couple started to really put together the garden's current incarnation around 14 to 15 years ago. They also removed the pool and replaced it and the vegetable garden with the islands of landscaping. Regular grass grows in between.

"This became our empty-nest project," said Mrs. Nowacki.

Perennials account for around 95 percent of their flowers, ranging from forsythia to primroses to wisteria. Just a few petunias make up the annuals planted each year.

"I like so many flowers," Mrs. Nowacki said. "It's hard to pick one flower as my favorite."

Among the flowers, the Nowackis planted bushes and shrubs like holly, red twig dogwoods, azaleas and rhododendron. They interspersed decorative grasses and surrounded the plants with shredded brown mulch, some of which came from wood cut down in their own yard this year. They built walls to one side of the yard with the help of their neighbors, Nick and Connie Genova, and Mr. Nowacki added brick edging to the islands.

"Wherever you look, there's work we put into it," Mr. Nowacki said.

Creating and keeping a garden of such scale does pose challenges, like reining in the growth if it becomes too overwhelming. They split one patch of decorative grasses into four when it grew too large and replanted the sections elsewhere in the yard.

And while growing perennials is more affordable than having to buy new annuals each spring, it also requires maintenance every fall. The Nowackis must trim back the plants to "put the garden to bed" for the winter, then hope the growth survives the chilly weather.

"Then in the spring, the fun begins," Mrs. Nowacki said.

Caring for the space takes time, but Mr. Nowacki, a retired accountant, noted gardening was a release for him.

"You've got to enjoy just being out," he said.

Everything in their garden has a story, the Nowackis pointed out. One of the islands houses a couple of their collections, the rocks they "relocated" from 47 states they visited plus bowling balls they picked up at yard and estate sales and now use as garden decorations. They now encircle one of the 13 trees on the property, which include the varieties of crepe myrtle, Asian lilac, dogwood, oak, chestnut, rose of Sharon, flowering Japanese cherry and flowering plum.

Several statues of angels plus ones of St. Francis, St. Theresa and the Blessed Virgin Mary also dot the landscape. The centerpiece of the tiered and largest island in the garden is a concrete, smiling Buddha statue the Nowackis have affectionately dubbed "Bubba." He stays out all year and helps them celebrate various holidays with the help of decorations.

"We have fun with him," Mrs. Nowacki said, noting they are not trying to offend and adding with a laugh, "People think we have too much time on our hands."

The garden is always changing, and the Nowackis keep thinking of ideas. They even picked up a few during their travels to all 50 states, although they turned down one concept, in which a home lined its driveway with old toilets turned into flower pots.

"I said, 'No. I'm drawing the line there,'" Mrs. Nowacki said.

Mrs. Nowacki recommends aspiring gardeners become friendly with the folks at their local gardening centers, whom she credits for the help they provided her and her husband in making their ideas come to life.

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